Alexander McQueen's Savage Beauty: the best-dressed haunted house you will ever visit

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It is hard to work out precisely what James Phillips’s study of the fashion designer Alexander McQueen is meant to be. At the end of 100 minutes, it struck me that it was primarily an act of worship: a secular hymn to a famous iconoclast who died tragically young at the age of 40. However you choose to define it, the show certainly doesn’t offer much in the way of drama. It starts in the cluttered Mayfair workroom of McQueen, familiarly addressed throughout as Lee. His space has been invaded by a dark-haired girl named Dahlia, who claims that she is an adoring fan who simply wants a dress. But, as Lee and Dahlia go on a night journey through London, it transpires that she is his alter-ego. In the course of their trip, they visit the tailors where Lee started work as a cutter, encounter the fashion stylist Isabella Blow and end up on Lee’s home turf in the East End.

The further they travel, the darker becomes Dahlia’s depression, as if echoing that of her guide who, ironically, is left arguing the case for survival. Since Dahlia is basically Lee’s other self, there is little scope for conflict. But my chief complaint is that, although the show is full of allusions to Lee’s collections, it doesn’t tell us enough about how he worked. In Phillips’s reverent vision, he becomes the archetype of the doomed artist suffering under the pressure of out-topping his last creation. We are also told not once but several times that a dress is a sustaining illusion, “a fight between the world like the world is and the world like we want it to be”. But, although the piece is suffused with romantic agony and full of woozy generalities, it comes most alive when we actually see Lee getting to work with scissors and pins to make a dress for Dahlia that echoes The Girl Who Lived in the Tree collection.

Even if the show’s basic note is one of rapt obeisance, it is stylishly directed by John Caird and smartly choreographed by Christopher Marney, as mobile mannequins take us through the labyrinthine world of the hero’s imagination. Stephen Wight is also excellent as Lee: outwardly tough and self-assured, inwardly shy and vulnerable. Dianna Agron falls into monotonous vocal rhythms as Dahlia but there is good support from Tracy-Ann Oberman as Blow and David Shaw-Parker as an authoritative tailor. The real problem is that by treating Lee principally as a tortured genius, Phillips never gives us any great insight into the real McQueen.